- YEAR END COMPANIONSHIP -
DIVINATION WALK
------PROXIMITY, TABOO & IMMANENCE
'DESTRUCTION IS A CAUSE OF COMING INTO BEING' **
SOLSTICE, CONSENT, UNIFYING SYMBOLS,
SALTY REFUSALS, COMPOST,
& STAYING IN RESONANCE WITH KIN---
Dear Community,
Thank you very much for being a part of the Praxis inner life, in 2024.
2024, was towards embracing Darkness, Identity, Context, Liberation, and Belonging.
Together we did some valuable gaze refreshing, reclaiming, enquiring into the wisdom of and protecting our refusals, re-centralising intuition, de-conditioning from patriarchal, normative, hyper-positive, bypass, shame-loading and colonial gazes.
I am really proud of and grateful to you who keep in courageous connection with me, and I truly thank the folks who keep sharing their dreaming journeys with me - it honestly informs and enriches my research and my own liberation pathway, immensely, thank you.
Even if you are not coming in for sessions you are always welcome and invited to keep contact with me and exchanging about practices - through dreaming shares on the discord, book shares, etc.
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HOW SESSIONS HAVE BEEN GOING
This year my session notes now extend mostly over 5 pages per visit, of imagery and words from our work. These are always shared with the person having the session, this is a big difference of this praxis, with regular talk therapies or analysis.
The point of these notes is to hold image dialogues, open the container and expand/anchor the time and space of the session. A culture of note taking and archival is encouraged, for mutable beings during mercurial phases, who might not have strong mirroring or representation in the external - these notes might be important to have a chance to go back to, after many years, if necessary.
2 hour sessions extend into 3 or 4 hours without us noticing. Although this is not always ideal to manage the labour of this project, I am glad that when we get to meet to do the work, we do what needs to be done!
We also had the Roots To Freedom Group Ceremony this year, which I am very proud to say was geared for Gender Queer and Diasporic Psyche.
Through this, I found my niche - which was the same as it always was - nestled right within the Dark Feminine (again):
Transformation, Body, Identity, Taboo/Threat, and Context (Systemic/Realm).
'Only the perverse fantasy can still save us'
-Nancy Spector on Barney's Cremaster Cycle-
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AXIS OF PRACTICING
The axis of this practice is existential, non-hierarchical, (at the moment also still ‘anti-institutional’), focused into equity, economic justice and is aiming to be life-affirming without the bypass. The gaze stands in multiplicity, intimacy, chaos - in disagreement of othersing-pathology.
This process situates itself, straddling transcendences of intellectual energies and the immanence of processual energy.
Within the intellectual we define, within process & practice we disappear, merge.
In order to access Kinship practices, journeying into altered states, we acknowledge intersectionality, international coloniality (imperial powers) and our identity positioning within capitalistic-healing affected religion & spiritual practices.
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As of 2025, it will be ten years of entering into the practicing, and 4 years of session work as a collaborative merger from internal private world into the public space.
All experiences - especially the destructive ones - have been woven back into the practice as information for generating a specific intersectional-perspective on energy & ritual practices.
The fabric of my lived experience as 'otherised body' is woven into the ethics of this practice.
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YEAR-END COMPANIONSHIP
As many of you are passing through Family Systems over the next days, I reflected on how we could stay in connection, to keep the resonance of our practices flowing.
The most joyful & easeful praxis I thought to share with you is a very low key invitation to join me on a simple Divination Walk with the trees in my local forest - I took a 30 minute stroll & here it is linked below. (You can watch it while lying on the couch and having a moments introversion, for example).
It's about having a touch point into reflecting and remembering on some of the moments we have shared in sessions, and perhaps some of the altered state journeys you yourself had with Spirits.
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SOLSTICE - NEW YEAR : DIVINATION WALKS
Over the Winter Solstice days we connect with a practice of presence - as we move from potent Wood Dragon (treasure, elixir, fantastical alchemy, 'alien'-unknowns, liquid gold of the soul) of 2024 into potent Wood Snake (transformation, flexibility, earth alchemy, reality rebirth, curious activator, healer) of 2025.
A divination walk, as a practice is to 'not try' nor extend outside of ourselves with some kind of artificial 'hope' (as dissociation); grabbing onto nature, imprinting it with our own anthropocentric image (extracting and forcing it into a limited, human form) - but To Open. To perceive holistically, what 'is'. Returning to and being humbled by the groundedness of our own mortality.
Speaking of our own Mortality: here's a 30 day apprenticeship practice into discovering your own, from Mathura “Temwa” Mahendren. who is also responsible for this toolkit of 'Dismantling The Masters Tools' for social R&D.
On this walk:
What subtle 'nature of being' reaches towards me?
Can I dissolve into relation with a forest?
What starts to be in collaboration with me, on the psychic level?
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ASKING CONSENT ( RESPECT PRACTICE )
& RESPECT OF A WHOLE REALM
When we open towards allowing a forest to consent to be in communication with us, we show up 'half way' with gaze, not 'jumping through' an image, not grabbing with our eyes, and forming it in our own judgemental images and projections.
It's like re-watching a show you have seen a 100 times, in the background.
Images wash through like waves on a shore.
The aim with allowing a forest to consent means not penetrating (diving in).
Giving consent means giving psychic space.
We must allow the other a chance to unwind - there needs to be attunement.
Without attunement, you can’t know anything at all about consent.
Consent is a nuanced sensing capacity of attuning.
Consent is a practice of respect, which is central in relational praxis.
With a Forest, we need to 'give into' in the way the Forest allows.
When we allow ourselves to 'drown' into the 'dark clutches' of the forest, by means of images washing over us, and submerging us, our gaze is transformed in collaboration with The Forest.
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The consent of the practice is about acknowledging what is ritual and what is not.
This is about recognising the Body of The Ritual.
We do not ‘own’ ideas. There is no 'concepting of a ritual' outside of the process of actually being in ritual.
To me, there is no 'getting inspired by' something, that is not classified 'use'.
Most especially not without also holding the body of it's truth, and speaking from that body.
Consent, and Respect brings the question:
How to situate ourselves between intellect, intellectualism and process, holding and body of a practice?
When intellectualism can become mind co-opting, extractivsism
and process brings us into merging, which can also be an engulfing?
The mind does not 'own' ritual, nor have governance over it.
Mind bows at the gate, and gives up control. - A sentiment spoken through Malidoma Patrice Somé.
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UNIFYING SYMBOLS
Blur the eyes to open up a possibility of 'Symbolic Sight'.
Diabolic is what separates, Symbolic is what unites. Symbolic is antidote.
The practice of taking a walk in the Forest.
Is a re-membering of the opening of your eyes, towards Beauty.
Allow Beauty to enter the eye, the sensorial body, the heart, and the deep spaces - outside of language.
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STAYING IN RESONANCE WITH KIN
Being present together within our kinship, can also accompany you through this moment when we are in close proximity to family systems, and perhaps some of the painfully fixed aspects of our grid, which we are transforming through.
When I talk about Kin - I am talking about your spiritual connection and the way you image the centre(s) of yourself in relation to all that is.
Kinship is about reciprocity and the space between beings, it encourages the difference, merging and the muddiness of contradiction - it is does not have this undertone of 'sovereignty' to the point of becoming impenetrable in a 'higher energy vibration' - which is what happened through the manifestation practices that were taken into the western mind and turned hyper-individual.
Within Kinship I do not use the words 'higher' or 'lower' vibration - I prefer 'tight' or 'loose' vibration.
Kin-Care means keeping the bodily spiritual connection, first and foremost to your Spirit Council and within a mode of being which keeps the spaces of your sensorial body open to imagination, receiving synchronicities, and joy.
We receive and interact from both the horizontal plane, and the vertical planes.
'Kin' does not mean to grab a hold of our human friends, and always be together. There is no assumed wrongness in a relationship breaking down. Spending time alone as long you are connected to yourself is to be connected to Kin. Some of us have been indoctrinated with 'old friends are good friends'. That might be true, but also, all things transform. Kin is not ‘at the expense of truth, and relaxation’. Sometimes relationships need a pause and that allows a transformation to occur.
This is ethos of a queer, abolitionist, feminist praxis - Here we are tapping into the 'Immanence' (feminine or non-binary aspect) which is one step past 'transcendence' (holy third, a product or goal) and is about 'the body of reality', the psyche as forest, the holding, the receptive & patient chaos.
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PROXIMITY, TABOO & IMMANENCE
'DESTRUCTION IS A CAUSE OF COMING INTO BEING' **
Transcendence is a product who exists within a realm - Immanence is the realm.
Immanence, is a Grand Mother, and in transformation, also a newly borne World, The Blank Slate.
... a renewed Cosmos-Image, a new Map, Grid, Egg ...
Not the one who 'oppresses & forms' us, who is the old skin, dissolving, but the one, which is created, after turning inwards and having left the old, letting it dissolve.
If we think of a Butterfly, as 'the transcendent' (from the cocoon), the immanence is the whole reality the butterfly exists within.
Immanence is new template, benevolent, the most outer supportive infa-structure of repetitions (Faith) and The Body of The Ritual**.
The Matrix, The Medicine Circle, The Medicine Bag, The Spirit within all matter... the hidden 'holding' hologram.
Clay-body container.
---- **As the mind does not 'own' ritual, nor have governance it, neither can a mind know ‘over’ Immanence, mind bows to immance also, as with ritual, and gives up control. ----
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NO - THING
Within Immanence there is no change necessary, nothing is, and all is.
Immanence = O
There is no need to move, adapt.
Like the spiders that hang around upside down in the corners of the room, waiting, their web interconnected and inseparable sensory extensions of their bodies.
Immanence is patient, graceful, protective, governing, constant and allowing -
'always was, always will be'.
Immanence in transformation is working & active outside of the individual mind.
Immanence is house, is psyche.
Post-colonial reflection : With ‘integration’ (Dual) bringing often a re-centralisation of coloniality, transcendence can be additional and the holy third - Immanence is the Cosmic Rearrangement, 4, Soul.
IMG: Louise Bourgeois
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TABOO AS A PATH TO IMMANENCE
It will be through the experience of the toxic, the taboo, or the great transformational vessels like snakes, dragons, spiders, scorpions, and symbols of The Great (Destructive) Mother, that a Proximity Body would really get the access to Immanence.
To reach to Immanence - without the penetrative 'transcending' - one takes the way through the shadow and makes a radical acceptance of the inclusion of the existence of the taboo. (widen, deepen)
This is because a Body of Proximity knows itself through Relation and Non Being, and an intersectional 'coming into beingness' - this act of blooming, of being power full and full of life - means that it contradicts (in some way), a systemic power grid, and must challenge and defy notions of purity and danger.
For colonised psyche - this means including a special place for the brutality of the coloniser, not pushing it away but engulfing it through your access to immanence, using its power. We keep a space on our altars reserved for this space for ‘destruction’. ( Is this the same as ‘evil’ ? Or is there a difference between types of ‘destructions’ and types of ‘evils’? )
Intersectional, female identifying, and gender fluid bodies know themselves more commonly through the 'We', not through the 'I'. This is a knowing of relational reality. Of I as also 'other', due to the centralisation of society into the cis male gaze. 'I' becomes extrapolated into at least two. One of those 'I' 's is self - policing.
Empathy knows itself through the feeling temperature of the realm.
Emotional Intelligence and receptivity knows itself through it's mutability, -or- how it is manipulated in a relation or a realm - and perhaps its refusal to forced or assumed mutability.
Taboo is the space where Shadows will take you - which is on the very outer most edges of the old templates, and exactly where we can find a new fertile dark.
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DROP ANCHORS INTO TABOO
If it is coming up for you, going to this area in your grid and dropping some anchors to open up the depths (and the height, but this will happen by default later), is a wisdom & power generating process for a Body of Proximity.
I personally very rarely journey to an upper world in session work, I always go downwards. This creates the main vertical axis of my cosmology.
Perhaps this is because I grew up in an absurdly and dangerously positive ‘ideal & heights’ of colonial Australia, that I already spent too much time having to reach upwards, and I knew this was only a masking and denial of the truth of existence.
My feeling is that most of us need depth, not heights, also due to the idealisation and puer eternus culture (Patriarchy) - the heights can come later, through dreaming, because then you’ll know they are intimatly yours and delivered from spirit.
Through trauma, our innocence is broken very early on, but it is only through the recognition of this loss - a feedback loop - echo locations - holding loss and redognising - which really breaks the spell, because its a spiral process, not an immediate ‘click’.
We taste the Salt of The Earth - the boundaries of our responsibility and our personal preference are found - and a Body of Proximity has the chance to mature through the claiming and ownership of that map and all of its informed refusals.
With the Salt of The Earth, stay curious.
(Helen Chadwick, "Of Mutability", 1986.)
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FREEDOM & LIBERATION CODES
Within an infantilised, norm-core society, bodies who are not faced with any proximity are not as likely to be able to break through into the initiation and through the awakening wall into a coming of age which unites deeply opposing forces - which is required if you would like to turn into an Elder.
An infantilised, norm-core society will only cover up things, jump over them and keep 'coping', which means the opposing forces or 'split' in energy, will always remain like a dormant Volcano under the surface of a seemingly sane psyche.
We prefer to go to the Volcano and sing and dance at the Volcano's feet for mercy, offering up some kind of sacrifice. Without doing this we would not have alchemised and be carrying new wisdoms in the body. We are transformed by phenonema, it is neither 'good' nor 'bad' as there are always pros and cons to all ways.
Freedom and Liberation Codes are not necessarily always positive, fun or ‘good’. They know nothing of ‘politeness’.
If Freedom and Liberation Codes come and you are the Curse Breaker the best thing to do is not allow yourself to internalise too much wrongness, which stops the process (easier said than done).
You need just enough ‘internalised wrongness’ to keep the drive going forward but to keep you humble, checking your own bullshit, and, in your own lane.
Real transformation hurts. It does take something from you. You will never get that back.
But to stay unchanged is not a transformation, and transformation must ‘be’, because transformation is the constant.
Psychic comfort & centralisation is not an awakener, nor a unifier, it wont bring you to the edge of the depths of yourself, neither will it ever teach you how to carry opposing forces and contradictory dynamics.
Agnes Pelton, ‘Messengers’ (Death)
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SALTY REFUSALS
We need the Salt of the Earth, The Bitterness, The Snake Bite, not only initiations, these are our only hopes in becoming formed for resilience. These are ceremonies for coming into being, rites of passage. And I dont mean to gloify here. Rites of Passage are Subversive.
Through the acknowledgements, self recognitions and eventual refusal - a Body of Proximity states who they are, which also stays flexible and is a constant process, as we constantly transform.
The refusal is a consistent holding, a resistance to an old world's oppression and an inner holding of new, chosen, organically grown, immanence.
(The refusal is not even an active refusal anymore, its a space holding.)
When a Body of Proximity is entirely within a new immanence, by choice, there are Freedom and Liberation codes released - woven all the way through - which benefit EVERYONE.
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COMPOSTING:
RELEASE INTO RESTING EARTH
While passing through a pathway of Destruction or Loss,
We take a moment to slow down enough, to rest within acceptance and holding of all Taboo, long enough to encourage a new Immanence (Holding) through ease.
Before we go for transcendence & achieving, first comes real rest.
If we don't have the resources to rest:
Who could we ask for resources in order to enable a moment of real rest, during this time?
Real rest is unique to each. Real rest for some introverts might not be a getaway holiday, but staying home. Real rest might look like sleeping, staying alone, rewatching movies, eating, tending to our clothes, mending, playing video games, or seriously chilling out.
To some it might look like being active out and about. For each it looks different.
' I AM SALT, I AM COMPOST, I RELEASE, I ACCEPT, I AM RESTING EARTH '
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Turning towards nature and soil, towards composting, is to turn towards Immanence.
To accept the composting - going back into the soil as a valid form of becoming new.
This is the way I would recommend to enter 2025, the Snake year, especially after the death and destruction we are aware of happening all around us, and the cruelty and brutality witihin being silenced, erased, or mis-labelled.
Snake who births the Cosmic Egg, which starts the world, Snake who bites the Cosmic Egg who ends the world.
‘... I saw a vast instrument, round and shadowed, in the shape of an egg. …’
(Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias I.iii)
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REMINDERS & RECOGNITIONS FOR CURSE-BREAKERS:
When we are 'Seen' in a way that steals our essence, this most definitely can drive the intuition mad - in mislabelling us. It is painful for the sensorial body, who only will expand in safe-attuned spaces.
This is especially more painful for anyone who has lived through narcissistic abuse, gaslighting and the extraction of life force energy and denial of libidinal energy that happens there.
When this happens it is because a se-er does not understand how to give consent, allowance, nor attunement.
Lack of vessel, reflection, echo, and the incongruence is at the level of immanence: Holding.
A presence therapy is about this witness - (not about 'changing' or forcing change, but 'allowing' blooming awakenings) is about generating this holding capacity through reflections, reflections and reflections.
Bring in WITNESS.
The most valuable act you can do, is search to understand yourself and hold that space, claiming what is yours with grace. It has nothing to do with hope. You already ARE.
We are in the right place at the right time.
We are in relationship with all and the disarray of this, is also part of the divinity.
The absurd, toxic, broken - is also the divinity.
There is nothing that needs to be 'fixed' within us.
It's all perfect and imperfect and 'ideal excellence' is just another mirage made of more salt.
We are coming into being, demolished and then coming into being again.
The destruction is the coming into being.
' I allow myself grace - which is an acceptance that I am accepted. '
- Peter Rollins
‘Sensoji Temple’: Legend has it that in 628 AD, fishermen found a statue of Kannon in the Sumida River, and Sensoji Temple was built to enshrine it.
‘Kannon’ (Ancient Japan) is also Guan Yin (Ancient China), is also Avalokitesvara (Ancient India).
Yoryu Kannon holds Willow Tree leaves - theses contain medicinal properties which have been known in Asia from antiquity and which are now used in the manufacture of aspirin.
'Buddha' is absorbed wholly into the Taoist cosmology, becoming another term used to describe the generative tissue at the source of all things in both the mental and physical realms.
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In the process together.
POWER from the inside towards the outside.
MADNESS! RESTING!
Sarah
Drawing by Louise Bourgeois.
**Reference to 'Sabina Spielrein: Destruction As A Cause of Coming into Being' - The great, unrecognised (and mislabelled) genius feminist voice at the beginning of psychoanalysis.
Feeling Nihilistic, in despair?
Check out this Theological & Philosophical Talk on Religion-less Liturgy:
-> 'Salvation from Salvation': A Conversation with Peter Rollins and Julie Reshe from Negative Psychology.
Perhaps you will connect through the 'ultimate lack' straight through to Salvation.
About Context :
Psychoanalysis under Occupation? Check out Lara Sheehi's work about colonial freedom and liberation within psychoanalysis, with special care focus for SWANA bodies.
About Identity :
Identity as Path - Zenju Earthlyn Manuel and my rant on Receptive Labour forced onto Bipoc bodies.